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Welcome to the Process Automation Blog, where you can read the perspectives from BSM experts. This Blog provides insights into the Process Automation solution, as well as technical details about specific IBM products.

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The best way to govern SAP Business Processes in the cloud and around

So, your SAP environment is in place, and you are planning for the next moves. It could be that part of the environment is scheduled to move to the cloud. Or it could also be that business wants to introduce some sleek SaaS player in the set of used applications. You may need to strengthen your backup strategy.
The next question is: how will you fit these new tasks in your busy day and keep ensuring tighter SLAs, obtain guarantees on the quality of service from the provider, and still welcome more requirements from business? You need to have watertight operations in place for to meet this challenging scenario.
SAP does contain functions to perform some automation, with the SM36 transaction, and the Process Chains, but they do not easily provide a bird's eye view of the whole processing, showing what parts of calculation are done when and in collaboration with whom. The problem will be further compounded, as in most of the cases, if SAP applications have to collaborate with best-of-breed applications that handle a tiny but critical portion of some process.
An Enterprise Scheduler is an impeccable solution for these problems, and some among the biggest SAP customers in the world have well understood that. They drive complex and heterogeneous sequences of processing steps giving to each the correct conditions and input data. In other places these companies wait for data to arrive from external sources, transform it into Idocs and wake up the processing chain. There is no magic in computing, and even the most complex and delicate system can have high rates of success and stability if each part receives the correct inputs, the right resources, sufficient credentials and the correct parameters, so the main question is to drive the unpredictable and surprise element out of the equation, and get a good night’s sleep!

Even when things don't turn out as expected, having an Enterprise Scheduler can save the day. Mapping out the state of jobs when a problem occurred, knowing which steps were executed, which ones were unsuccessful and how they could be restarted, provides the toolbox for a targeted and successful intervention, always within the boundaries of agreed Service Level Objectives. I've seen a simple table, filled for each day for the data collected by the IBM Workload Automation product, describe the SLO attainment and the global behavior of millions of individual jobs, meaning Support Quality Metrics, timeliness of Bill or Salary Payments, velocity to catch a customer order and ship it as soon as possible.
There is practically no way that the same results can be obtained by hand easily, and in any case such need would require the involvement of a skilled specialist. Moreover, a solution based on Enterprise Scheduling will scale up, and we have seen customers experiencing 300% or 500% growth without adding any new team members in Operations. Great companies have always been flex-ponsive to new market drivers and transformational technologies like cloud and many successful companies are reaping the business benefits by having a leading edge tool to drive their operational efficiency to new heights.

Workload Automation is one of those cultural steps every flex-ponsive companies should pursue, in their quest for operational excellence, irrespective of their size and type. To ease your journey to cloud with your SAP applications, an Enterprise Scheduling solution is critical. It can stabilize your SAP environment and free up your time for innovation.
Learn a related story on how Arcelor Mittal Gent achieved operational excellence with their SAP environment.http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/STRD-8CDJFX?OpenDocument&Site=gicss67sap&cty=en_us